You are a software developer who just completed a project and it's time to work on shipping it. Or you are an administrator and you need to deploy a plugin on the Mac computers of your network. Whenever you need to create an installation package or distribution for Mac OS X 10.5 or later, Packages is the powerful and flexible solution you're looking for.

Building payload not load of pain

With Packages, you can define which applications, bundles, documents or folders should be part of the payload of your installation packages and where they should be installed. You can even set what the owner, group or permissions of the payload items should be upon installation. And if you need to also install an existing package, just import it so that it can be added to your distribution.

Presentation Editor

With its WYSIWYG editor, Packages lets you set and localize the customizable panes of your distributions. Checking how your distribution looks like in different languages has never been so easy. You can even add Installer plugins to your distribution.

Dependencies Editor

When you need to define the dependencies between choices of your distribution, you can depend on Packages. You can use its visual editor to build simple or complex dependencies trees. You don't have to worry about looping, Packages automatically checks everything and only offers you viable dependencies.

Requirements Editors

Defining the requirements that should be met by your packages to be installed should not require you to think like a developer if you don't want to. With its user friendly requirements editors, Packages makes simple requirements very easy to define and yet still allow you to write more complex requirements using the JavaScript code editor.

Quick Build

If you need to quickly create an installation package for an application or a plugin, drag the item on the Packages icon in the Dock (or the Finder). Your package will be created. There's no step 2. Quick Build uses smart locators to figure out where the item should be installed. Smart Locators are also available from the payload editor pane.

Certification

To ensure that your distribution or packages are not be tampered with between the time you build them and they are installed, you can sign them. Packages can sign flat packages and distributions with a certificate.

Command Line Tool

Integrating Packages into an automated production workflow is easy with the packagesbuild command line tool. Once you have created your Packages project, the packagesbuild tool will let you build it from the Terminal, a shell script or an Xcode Run Script Build phase.

Eating your own dog food

Packages' distribution is built using Packages. Would you care about a solution that would not do that?

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